The Story About My Creativity Recharge

A few days ago, I asked myself the following question: “How many creaitvity dropouts am I actually entitled to?” Yes, how many. A justified question, regarding the fact that I had suffered from such a dropout the last 1 ½ months, yet love to call myself a creative person “born with inspiration and fantasy” whose mind blowing ideas are blowing my mind, allegedly every day. Yes, I desperately needed an answer as to whether I still could count myself among the rather imaginative people of the world (who simply had quite a lengthy pause) or whether I had to adopt myself to the idea that I belong among the less imaginative ones (who simply had the luck to be blessed with a handful of ideas along the way).

It is a justified question, reagarding the fact of the creative niche that I call blog that I built myself the past 1 ½ years. And over time, I have built myself a nice little routine of constant brainstorming for future content, wringing out last sources of inspiration, desperate longing for another brilliant concept (seemingly out of the blue). It has become a routine and with it an expectation to keep it up. Keeping up the blog, that I wish to be praised for its individuality and beautiful posts, interesting content and new perspectives. A blog that I have built safely around the foundation of many truly creative moments, a blog that then seemed to slip into the direction of a major percentage that I call very nicely premium-bullshitting. But no, maybe that is too harsh. Maybe I am being too harsh on myself with this description of my work. Maybe so, because to me, these last few weeks, have been a few motionless weeks when speaking of creativity. (not so motionless at all when I speak of other aspects, like for example leaving Canada behind me and coming home to my family in Switzerland, but that’s for another post).

I always like to speak honest with you. I try to maintain high expectations for this blog, I try to never disappoint myself nor my readers, and most importantly I try to improve its quality with every upload. These are big goals, no question, and therefore I have to emphasize the word “trying” since more than often I cannot attain them. But I reach in the right direction and I make the proper preparations for their achievement. And that is the part that I like about the sort of creative work I do here. By setting higher standards, there is no time left for me to settle myself (too frequently) with boring themes or repetitions of words that I wrote before.

Returning to the burning title question, I want to say that as much as I have told myself as well as others, that for some reason even under pressure, I always seem to find time and inspiration to fulfill my weekly duty of posting something part way interesting. After having made the experience of blogging over a year by now, I felt very secure that there is little that could interrupt my writing habit, or dear god definitely not my devotion to my blog and its readers. I guess you could say, that I live under the illusion that my creativity was stored somewhere in mind, all that I had left to do was to tap from the storage every now and then and voilà, I did it again: I was creative. (Whatever exactly that is).

You might have guessed it already ( and I clearly should have too), I was fatally wrong. I was wrong and I learned my lesson, just as life goes. And whenever life goes this way, I guess that I want to write about it. My passion for writing columns, designing photography series and so on still existed, but my interest was lost.

Somehow among my high standards of self improvement I did get lost in a routine where my weekly inspiration and with it my consistency and last of all motivation got lost.

This is not the story of someone with the typical “writers block”, who then leaves behind all stress and mundanity of life for a weekend trip away on the country side to refocus and find inspiration from within. No no, this is the story of me, who lost inspiration once and immediatly felt like a looser. I failed. Or did I just have no space in my brain left for imaginative texts and blogposts for a while? Did I just need a break, an actual break from constantly tapping into my “creativity storage”? Well who knows, but fact is that I didn’t want to give myself this recharge time and tried to write something together, but finally I lost my voice and authenticity. And it was no fun, so I just let it all down. In the back of my mind, my conscience was sadly sighing every Sunday that I let go by without even trying to write.

But really, I could not care, because if I would care, I would have to admit that I felt like I had no creativity left to use for me (not at the time anyways). A reality that I despised.

I assume you are waiting for the big moment when the wave of ideas hit me again. That moment didn’t exist for me. But slowly a few ideas for a new blog concept developed themselves and slowly I found a few themes again that were actually worth writing about. Among them, this insight of what I actually can or cannot expect of my own creativity. The answer to my question, is, I believe, that there is really no power above when ideas are given and when they aren’t since it is not really a conscious process.

My simile with the “creativity storage”, that I could tap whenever I needed it, might not be totally idiotic, but let’s say, that it can happen that I empty it and I am oblivious as how to refill it automatically.

Looking at it from this perspective, you might want to say, that if my “creative tank” is empty often and requires refilling, I make good use of it while its still full. That is an idea that I can life with, an abstract idea, but maybe an interesting one.

Perhaps, this perspective can help me through the frustration of my creative dropouts and remind me that the beautiful hours when my fingers can’t keep up with the precipitance of the words that desperately want to be eternalized on paper, are not over but only paused.

Either way, there is rather little I can do about it, that is of course, unless I will have another enlightment that will teach me better. In that case, I will naturaly share my wisdom with all of you, don’t you fret. Hopefully, I can hear a few of your own thoughts and experiences with this topic. Till then,let’s hope that my “creativity recharge” will last for a while and I want to thank all of you dearly, who actually took the time to read this chunk of text and those with more limited time who flew over the quotes and photos. I apologize for the deluge of words, but it seems to me, as if there were quite a few words that were held back for too long, and it seemed unfair to me, to should them back any longer.

“I assume you are waiting for the big moment when the wave of ideas hit me again. That moment didn’t exist for me” – Darn, I was waiting for this to see if I could solve this issue too – I feel so stuck at the moment, painfully so. Though that said, I was less creative than you to begin with so I’ve just slipped to the grounding line of zero creativity from a smaller height, but I still want to get it back, get unstuck, gradually find that ‘zing’ again and the energy and motivation to get that creative-ness back. Great post, very well written so thank you for sharing!
Caz x

Thank you so much Caz, you’re so sweet! I am really sorry that I can’t directly help you to solve your “issue”. Maybe we can’t look at it as an issue, but as a phase that we all need to go through. Still sucks of course, but you’re not along. I’m crossing my fingers for your zing-moment! Hope you have a great day 🙂

I think as creative people their is always that anxious part of us that worries ideas and the creativity juices will run out. There isn’t always going to be that big moment, but there always will be inspiration! Thanks for sharing this beauty! ❤

Hi! Firstly may I just say you’re a brilliant writer. I find your posts so inspiring, honest and heartfelt. I’ve been reading your blog since I started blogging myself (nearly 2 years ago) and I love it so much. Every time I read one of your posts I always think about how much talent you have. Just because your creative juices aren’t flowing right now doesn’t mean you’ve failed. With or without creativity, the fact remains that your blog is fantastic, and that certainly doesn’t make you a loser. Don’t give up- it would be a loss to both you and us. Good luck on your creativity recharge, however long it may be- I’ll miss you in the meantime! xxxx

Hi there, that’s probably the sweetest comment I’ve ever received, so thank you for that. I do find it hard at the moment to consistently blog, I’m crazy busy and on top of it my expectations for a post are probs set too high. BUt that’s okay, I’m trying to get back to it soon. Thank you tons for being such a lovely and loyal reader, it means so much to me. I hope you have a wonderful day! ❤

behind the blog

Hi there, Elena here.

You just landed on my little corner in the world wide web, I am a 15-year old self proclaimed fulltime hobby blogger. Here I write about what moves me, what worries me, and why I think life is pretty sweet.

Be my guest in this little world of hopefully thought-provoking, somewhat interesting and beautiful assembly of words that I collected here over the past year!